Application of finite-state transducers to the acquisition of verb subcategorization information

This paper presents the design and implementation of a finite-state syntactic grammar of Basque that has been used with the objective of extracting information about verb subcategorization instances from newspaper texts. After a partial parser has built basic syntactic units such as noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and sentential complements, a finite-state parser performs syntactic disambiguation, determination of clause boundaries and filtering of the results, in order to obtain a verb occurrence together with its associated syntactic components, either complements or adjuncts. The set of occurrences for each verb is then filtered by statistical measures that distinguish arguments from adjuncts.